Sugar Rain (35 page)

“What are her symptoms?” asked Dr. Caramel.

Thanakar was staring out the window. In an antiseptic courtyard, a tree with no leaves on it was reflected in a rectangular pool. “She has no symptoms,” he said. “But there is something about these drawings that breaks my heart.”

“Tell me,” said the doctor gently.

“She does not speak. She has a kind of sadness that seems morbid to me—you understand, I don’t have much experience with children. She is my adopted daughter. I took her from a house of prostitution in my city. Her situation there was beyond words, but it was not for long. Nevertheless, perhaps there are some wounds that can’t be healed. I had hoped it was enough just to be kind.”

Dr. Caramel made a cage out of his fingers and knocked it thoughtfully against his lips. “Kindness is meaningless outside a program of therapy,” he said. “And I’ve never heard of a mental problem that was not physical at bottom. This”—he tapped the drawings in his lap—“this is the key.”

But Thanakar kept on speaking, as if he hadn’t heard. “She came from a poor family. An only child; her father once was in the guild of carpenters and clowns. Nevertheless, I can’t pretend they were incapable of love. There are worse things than poverty. Her parents died in prison. Is that enough to kill someone with sadness? The human heart is such a mystery.”

Thanakar was staring out the window. It had begun to rain again—soft, slow drips which disturbed the surface of the pool. He said, “I took her from a house of prostitution. They had dressed her as a priestess in the shrine of Angkhdt. Yet it was a long time ago. Ten weeks. Life is hard for many people—why can’t she forget about these things? I have been kind to her.”

“Kindness means nothing,” repeated Dr. Caramel. “Look at this.” He tapped the drawing of the flea.

“I cannot think that she is mad,” said Thanakar. “What is normal, in these circumstances? It is more healthy to forget, for a wound to heal and show no trace. But there are wounds that bleed and bleed.”

Dr. Caramel was embarrassed by this talk. “There is always some physical manifestation,” he said, rising from his chair. “I would like to examine the young lady, if I could.”

“She has terrible dreams,” continued Thanakar, but then he stopped. Dr. Caramel had clapped his hands again, and in a moment the nurse brought Jenny in. She seemed subdued. She came to stand next to Thanakar near the window, but did not look at him. And when Dr. Caramel approached her, she let him touch her. She bent her head forward so that Dr. Caramel could examine the back of her skull; he had a tiny flashlight in one hand, and with the other he pulled the hair back from her neck, stroking it against the grain. He had put on a pair of glasses, and his mouth was partly open. His lips were taut. “Aha,” he said. “Aha, I thought so. Look. I told you.”

He had combed her hair back from the nape of her neck, revealing sad, pink skin. Just where her spinal column met her skull, there was a little mark.

“Look,” said Dr. Caramel. “That’s where it entered in.”

 

Thanakar took her away. In his pocket he carried Dr. Caramel’s surgical diagram, drawn on tracing paper over one of Jenny’s sketches. He had proposed making a small incision in the skull, wide enough for his fingers. He had proposed reaching in to see if he could grab hold of one of the insect’s legs. Or if the disease had progressed, and the flea had burrowed out of reach into the corridors of Jenny’s mind, he proposed tempting it out with sugar-coated tweezers.

The next morning Thanakar took Jenny to another doctor. “I’m glad you came to me,” said Marcel Paraclete. “In this city you will find a scandalous number of incompetents and quacks. I pity the poor invalid who finds himself in any waiting room but mine.”

At least that’s what Thanakar thought he said. It was hard to tell. He was dressed in a suit of plastic overalls from head to foot, and his voice was muffled under a mask of plastic gauze that covered his whole face. His waiting room was a cubicle of white tile, without windows or furniture. He had observed them through the skylight, and then told them through a speaking tube to proceed into an inner office, where he greeted them. He motioned them to chairs, and then sat down at his desk.

On a table stood an array of surgical gloves and facemasks, under a sign that read, For Your Own Protection. Dr. Paraclete indicated the display with plastic fingers, but Thanakar shook his head. “It is … premature,” he said, looking around the room. The office did not seem particularly clean, though it stank of disinfectant. There were stacks of books and papers everywhere, and dust on the carpet near where Thanakar and Jenny sat.

Inside the plastic suit, the doctor shrugged. “Contagion is a subtle thing,” he mumbled.

There was an uncomfortable silence while Dr. Paraclete fished out a cigarette. His suit had a zipper over the mouth, and he unzipped it. He lit the cigarette and blew a puff of smoke into the room; Thanakar could smell tobacco mixed with marijuana, as well as something else, some sweet antiseptic smell.

“Contagion is a subtle thing,” repeated Dr. Paraclete, more clearly now that his mouth was bare. “Subtle and insidious. Viruses and microbes, I have devoted my life to them, classifying, analyzing, and destroying. I see from your hands that you, too, are a doctor, though doubtless of an insufficient kind. Even so, even in Charn you must have heard of me. Otherwise you would not have come.”

Uncomfortable, Thanakar caressed his knee. “I understood you were a psychoanalyst,” he said.

“Precisely. I am the first. I am the only man who understands the true pathology of mental illness. Microbes, sir, microbes! For generations we have treated influenza, bloodpox, cholera, sometimes with wonderful results. We have had success with many new antibiotics. Why not neurophrenia, paranoia, unhappiness, and hysteria?”

“You believe these to be contagious illnesses?” asked Thanakar.

“Highly contagious. Let me exemplify. One patient is an alcoholic. Well, what is the first thing I discover, but that most of his friends are also alcoholic. What is more, his father also drank. You see? It is because a child’s immune system is so weak. Adults are resistant, but a child can be exposed and never know it. There is an incubation period, of course. I am working with a man who has a history of child abuse. Well, as it turns out, his uncle had abused him when he was only twenty-three months old. The period of incubation lasted most of his adult life.”

“I’ve never thought of it like that,” said Thanakar, caressing his leg.

“Think of it now. Think of yourself. Are you happy? No, don’t tell me. Think. Think about your friends. I tell you, two unhappy people can infect and reinfect each other until they die.”

“And you,” asked Thanakar. “Are you a happy man?”

Dr. Paraclete shook his head. “Too soon,” he moaned, sucking on his cigarette. “I was exposed too soon.”

 

Thanakar spent the evening in Jenny’s room. He had a stack of drawings on his lap, and they sat together on Jenny’s bed, examining them by the light of the bedside lamp. Jenny was sucking on her thumb and stroking her upper lip with the edge of her forefinger. She was leaning her head against Thanakar’s shoulder, and from time to time she would turn her head to press her face against his shirt, to sniff at the dark material.

“This one,” said Thanakar. He had picked up one of a new series. Jenny had finished with her drawings of the head-shaped mountain, and instead had penetrated deep inside. There, among caves and waterways and rough-hewn tunnels, two women slowly struggled up into the light. Some of these new drawings showed islands and dark lakes, and cirques covered with houses, and caverns lit with bonfires, and rocky warrens full of life. They showed armies marching, and struggling together in the dark. They showed people washing livestock in the murky pools. They showed tunnels cut out of the rock, and some were dry and clean, and some were damp and fleshlike, with bulging stalactites and slick walls. And always somewhere, prominent in the foreground, distant and occluded in the back, separate from the rest of the detail, always the figures of the two women were included in the drawing, muffled in shadows and black clothes, their faces always hidden.

“This one,” said Thanakar. In the middle of the page a village rose up the sides of a great cavern, built on tiers cut into the rock. A central bonfire illuminated the streets and cast its beams into the far recesses of the drawing, down into the far left-hand corner, where two women crouched among the stones. They were in a narrow passageway, separate from the rest of the cavern. One had collapsed against a boulder, hiding her face, while the other was holding up a lizard by its tail.

“This one,” said Thanakar. He rubbed his finger over the image of the woman, the one holding the lizard.

Jenny shook her head and buried her face in Thanakar’s shoulder. “Tell me,” he said. “Who is she? Who is this one?” He pointed to the other figure, crouched against the stone.

Again Jenny turned her face against the doctor’s shirt. And she didn’t look again until he had reached the last of the drawings. At long last it was a landscape, a hillside aboveground, and there was weather and fresh air and light. Two women struggled down a slope of gravel and shaped rock.

Then Jenny looked up. She reached out her hand to the doctor’s neck, to where a golden locket hung from a chain, a tiny thing, unopened now for weeks, containing a single hair and a photograph of Charity Starbridge, taken when she was a young girl.

 

That evening, far away, Princess Charity emerged out of a hole in the ground into a light, fine, crystal rain. By that time she had spent several weeks in the dark, and her pupils were dilated, and there was mud on her face and cobwebs in her hair. In the hour after sunset she crossed through a barricade of planks put up in the shape of an X over the mouth of an abandoned mine just twenty miles from the Caladonian frontier. The mine emerged into a gravel pit, a long, broken slope stretching down into the rain. If Charity had not been too fatigued to raise her head, if she had cared to look, she would perhaps have noticed that the entire hillside had been built into the shape of a woman’s face. Ruined and eroded by the rain, nevertheless it was still recognizable—the face of the fourteenth abbess of a local priory, who had been part owner of the mine. Charity emerged through a hole under her left eye and slid halfway down her cheek before she was able to stop herself. She sat down wearily in a pile of shattered rock and looked around.

Above her the antinomial labored down the slope. She was bleeding from cuts on her forehead and her hands, and the lines in her face were filled with grime. She was whistling through the gaps in her teeth, and she held her flute in her left hand. Then she stopped suddenly, and crouched down in the hump of a small boulder, and the music she was humming changed a little. She was out of breath, and the notes came in ragged gasps, but soon they formed themselves into a different melody, more solitary, less compromising, the song of herself, which no one but herself would ever understand. She watched Charity diminish among the rocks of the lower slope; she made a small gesture with her flute, and then she turned away. For she had seen in her mind’s eye a stream of water flowing from the north, over the next hill, and in her mind she followed it, mile after mile, back up into her own country. When Charity looked back she had disappeared, and the princess was too tired and hungry to go back up to find her. She didn’t care, for she had seen the lights of a town shining down below.

On the hillside Charity sat listening for a moment, to see if she could catch a wisp of melody somewhere, an intimation of the song called “now I am.” But there was nothing, only the crystal rain as fine as mist, drying to a crystal powder on her shoulders and her hair. In a little while she got up and went forward, down into the world.

That night, past midnight, Jenny Pentecost drew a picture of the princess eating dinner. In that little village on the slopes of the mine, Charity fell in among simple, pious folk, for whom the revolution was just distant words. She was too tired to dissimulate, and when they found out who she was they fed her the first new vegetables of that spring—potatoes as small and as precious as pearls. They made a bath for her in a tin tub, and then saved the dirty bathwater and decanted it in earthen vessels, and sprinkled it upon their hearths and fields, their children and their household gods. They bowed their heads and would not look her in the face.

In their village many houses still were empty, abandoned and not yet reoccupied. In one of these, a stone building that had been a shrine, they made a home for her. Each family brought gifts: blankets, pillows, mattresses of straw. And they were with her constantly, asking her blessing or advice, or just sitting near her, staring at her every movement. They were amazed by everything she did, by the way she sat and drank and combed her hair, by the way she yawned and slept. Sometimes when she was asleep, they would come near to touch her hands.

During the next week Jenny Pentecost drew many pictures of these scenes. But always Charity’s face was hidden, so that as Thanakar pored over them, he was concerned only with trying to find some clue as to the child’s illness. He had no way of understanding, nor could Jenny have told him, for by that time she only spoke in whispers, and in a language that was private to herself alone. It was based on a system of numerology that seemed to have sprung unaided from her own heart, for it had no basis in mathematics or mythology.

She had assigned numbers, arbitrarily, it seemed, to weather patterns, places, states of mind, types of food, and articles of clothing. These she would multiply and combine with the date and the hours of the day, to form a calculation for each thought and action, each event, identifying its position in a landscape of her own. “5719076 x 9191919,” she would whisper to herself very softly.

She had made a catalog of all her thoughts and memories. And every morning she would draw a quick cross-section of her head, with the flea growing ever larger, its chamber at the back of her skull ever expanding. Every morning it would crack the wall of some tiny cubicle in that vast labyrinth and suck out the occupant into its mouth. The flea was feasting on her memories. Every day the number she had penciled in the margin of her sketch grew smaller.